Is Long Form Content Taking Over The Google?

I read an article the other day about how long form content (a fancy word for really long articles) is dominating Google now. This seems to be counter intuitive to today’s busy world as people try to consume less info in smaller chunks AND Gary Vee is writing whole books about how being brief and to the point is winning over long, intense posts.

What does make sense to me is that the “thin” sites from days of yore were made precisely to game the systems. These were full of short, crappy, spun posts that did not benefit Google’s users, the searcher. So maybe deep in the bowels of Google’s algorithm is a favoritism towards long content. How does Matt Cutts sleep at night knowing all the secrets of Google and still not telling us!!!

A Non Scientific Study of Long Form Content Results – My Data

I am not a math girl so I am not going to do an in depth study of numbers and variables, but what I do have is my analytics data that shows my old-old site with great traffic and a newer site that is process of growing. Let’s take a peek at what those sites tell us about the length of articles in combination with their popularity (only based on my numbers – I know, you math whizzes are cringing right now!)

Best pages with views and word count Marketing Artfully (minus the home page and sales pages):

Conclusions…first off, I don’t really write posts between 300-400 words so there is NO chance for that length to be represented. That said, here is the breakdown by percentage of my top blog posts by length:

Epic (1500-2500 words) – 12.5%

Wordy-McWorderson (1000-1500) – 6.25%

Long But Not Stupid Long (500-1000) – 68.75%

Shortys – (400-500) – 12.5%

It seems like the sweet spot for getting traffic is somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words with 800-ish topping the list.

Google Results

Now lets go outside my posts and see how long the top Google results are for things I care about!

Conclusions – well I am in REALLY good company! I am sharing the first page with the likes of Entrepreneur, Neilsen and Mashable. All are between 498 and 1,281 words (with the exception of Neilsen’s 126 words with a couple of graphs). Pretty spread out, let’s look at another one!

Conclusions – The NAR (National Association of Realtors) and Realtor.com dominate this keyword. That said, if you are a Realtor looking for marketing help you may wind up skipping the “official” sites after you have visited them once and move onto the sites lower down the page. I get a lot of traffic from Realtors looking for marketing help so they must be coming from somewhere!

The Nate Weiner article referenced…most interesting, ““Engagement around articles is heavily weighted towards longer form and higher quality content,” says Weiner. Metrics of “engagement” vary, but include: the likelihood of a user actually opening a piece, how often they open it, whether an item is shared, whether it’s favorited, and whether it was read through to completion or abandoned mid-scroll.”

Final long form content and Google thoughts. I think that we can safely say that a sweet spot to rank in Google for a specific keyword is about 800-1,000 words. There is also a bunch there around the 500 word mark but the concept that you can churn out 300 word minimum posts and get a quick hit ranking from Google is probably an urban myth. Hitting those high spots takes time, dedication and great content.

Side note, I follow ALL of these sites and they do not have just one amazing post about the topic. To rank well for a search term, your whole website has to have a cumulative ranking for that term and then you can break through with a great post that ranks on page one.

What does that mean? If you have a website that is all about Customer Demographics and write an AMAZING post about Social Media Marketing you may have a chance of that one ranking. BUT, if you have a site about weight loss and write that same AMAZING post about Social Media Marketing, your chances of ranking well diminish greatly!

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